Vanity Fair story on Flight 447 - Looooong but worth the read.

The Human Factor

Airline pilots were once the heroes of the skies. Today, in the quest for safety, airplanes are meant to largely fly themselves. Which is why the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed 228 people, remains so perplexing and significant. William Langewiesche explores how a series of small errors turned a state-of-the-art cockpit into a death trap.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

I think I watched a Nova Special on that crash and the investigation. Highly recommend watching it if you can find it on line.

is this the flight that Brady Hoke took when he first came to scUM?

The pilots did the opposite of what you need to do in a stall

gHost Spartan wrote:Can someone post the Cliff notes version?

1. Captain's sleeping, two co-pilots in command
2. instrument ices up, alarms go off, confusion about true airspeed ensues.
3. one co-pilot holds his stick back the whole time, the other occasionally pushes his stick down.
4. computer takes average of the two inputs causing plane to repeatedly stall
5. Captain is woken up just in time to figure it all out but it's too late, they smash into the ocean.

5. Actually the captain didn't figure it out until it was too late, by the time he figured it out(and he was not at the controls) there was not enough altitude left for them to recover. They were fucked either way.

goodbar wrote:

1. Captain's sleeping, two co-pilots in command
2. instrument ices up, alarms go off, confusion about true airspeed ensues.
3. one co-pilot holds his stick back the whole time, the other occasionally pushes his stick down.
4. computer takes average of the two inputs causing plane to repeatedly stall
5. Captain is woken up just in time to figure it all out but it's too late, they smash into the ocean.

3a. Alarms stop when instruments determine reading is impossible - when one pilot corrects the plane enough to bring it back toward correct flight enough to be within "possible" parameters again alarm starts sounding again making them think the opposite is true.

pulling69 wrote:5. Actually the captain didn't figure it out until it was too late, by the time he figured it out(and he was not at the controls) there was not enough altitude left for them to recover. They were fucked either way.

yeah, that's what I meant. he had enough time to figure it out, but not enough time to do anything about it.

So how did co-pilot Brandon and co-pilot Hoke survive the crash when everyone else died?

tTito wrote:So how did co-pilot Brandon and co-pilot Hoke survive the crash when everyone else died?

Technically they didn't. Their bodies are being kept alive on life support but they aren't much more than vegetables at this point.

Vanity Fair? Meh. I'm waiting for Harper's and The Paris Review to chime in.